Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to electronic content. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for facilitating filtering undesirable content based on anti-tags.
Related Art
Over the past decade, a major shift has taken place in the way that people receive information. The Internet has become the primary source for news, entertainment, financial information, commerce, etc. In addition, access to the Internet is being integrated into virtually every type of device from radios and televisions, to cars and trucks, to phones and tablets, and to household devices, such as toasters, light switches, and power meters, to name a few.
With an ever-growing number of content providers, coupled to an increasing number of devices providing content, it can be extremely difficult to access desired content from the content pool. Content aggregators, portals, and various social networking sites allow users to define desired content in terms of instructions for linking to existing accounts and services, subscribing to feeds, and specifying desired categories. Furthermore, these providers typically let users perform searches that eliminate content with a specific keyword, and allow users to block content from specific sources. However, these constraints may block a user from discovering content that she may actually want to see. For example, if a user performs a search, specifically excluding all content with the keyword “politics” because she does not want to be presented with political content, then the user may not be presented with an article relevant to her search that happens to include the word “politics” in a manner that is not relevant to the main point of the article. Furthermore, a user may block content of a source because 99% of the content is undesirable; however, that eliminates the ability of the user to discover the 1% that is desirable.